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Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Icelan
by ellyagg 13y ago
Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Iceland. Why is violent crime so rare in New Hampshire?
[http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...]
Not that New Hampshire is unique. There are other states larger than Iceland that have similarly low murder rates.
- sp332 13y agoA couple of the major reasons the article puts forward also apply to New Hampshire. First, we have lots of guns here. In fact our state's constitution requires the state to give a concealed carry permit to anyone who passes a background check and sends in the form with $10. Since gun ownership has a controversial effect on crime, perhaps a more compelling reason is that we only have 2 major cities in NH. And neither of them are really big enough to have an "inner city". We have one of the lowest GINI coefficients (a measure of income inequality) in the nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...
- danbruc 13y agoIn comparison with other countries this is still a relatively high value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
- sp332 13y agoYeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.
- 13b9f227ecf0 13y agoIt's proximity to Canadian latitudes. The nearer you get to Canada in the USA, consistently you get better educational outcomes and crime rates. The obvious solution to our social problems in America is to move all the low achievers to be near the Canadian border.
- bmm6o 13y agoDetroit is about as close as you can get (geographically) to Canada.
- kyllo 13y agoI hear Buffalo, NY has a pretty high violent crime rate as well.
- gwern 13y agoCongratulations, you won today's "reply to a statistical generalization with a single outlying datapoint/anecdote" no-prize! Write in for your fabulous reward.
- bmm6o 13y agoAnd 100 HN points to you for spotting the fallacy! Well done, but you don't really believe the suggestion that after controlling for all else, closeness to Canada ends up being correlated with educational outcomes and crime rates, do you? It's obviously a joke.
- gwern 13y agoI think that if you really control for all else like ethnicity, it would go away, but to condition on that much would miss the point.
- jfb 13y agoPerhaps better to say, "Windsor is as close as you can get (geographically) to Detroit".
- dm2 13y agoCould the weather have anything to do with it? Could also be partly the lack of tourists or type of tourists, compared to warmer areas.
- Swisscoder 13y agoI agree the Cold weather has to do a lot with the behaviour of the people. Also Iceland is one of the Ten Least Crowded Places in the World.
- subsystem 13y agoYes, but... "With a population of 200,852, Greater Reykjavík comprises over 60% of the population of Iceland in an area that is only just over 1% of the total size of the country." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area
- kyllo 13y agoBoston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence. I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.
- zequel 13y agoMass has very little gun violence, in fact, ~ 3.1 per 100k. "Plenty of violence" isn't a helpful statement.
- kyllo 13y agoOK, so now we get to play "compared to what?" OP is about murder rate, not gun violence rate. (2011): National rate: 4.7 Northeast rate: 3.9 MA rate: 2.8 NH rate: 1.3 MA's rate is lower than the national average and lower than the Northeast regional average, but more than double than NH's average. My argument is that NH has a particularly low murder rate because it doesn't really have any big cities--the populated areas are mostly suburban. High murder rates correlate with high population density (and poverty). If the nearby metropolis of Boston were inside NH's borders, then I think NH would have the higher murder rate. Do you disagree with that assessment?
- mistermann 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry